Huzzah! The masses have spoken, and working from home is “the new normal” don’t ya know?
At least, it is for now, until the new normal gets replaced with an even newer normal, orange becomes the new black and pants with flares return to fashion.
But in the desperate mission to avoid any physical human contact over the last couple of years, I can’t help but wonder whether we collectively turned a blind eye to some realities of working from home.
These are realities that need to be brought into sharp focus now that more than a few people are wondering why they can’t work from home all the time.
And perhaps we need to also accept that some people, irrespective of their ability to use MS Teams, shouldn’t be working from home at all.
So let’s talk about that.
You’ve Got a Computer – Good Start
For many firms, the solitary pre-requisite for working from home seems to be the existence of a computer inside that home that you know how to use.
This is hardly a high bar by modern standards.
But as I watch fun stories about kids walking naked into shot, parents hustling toddlers out of the room and roomies setting up their new laptops in the kitchen while they cook pancakes – a thought occurs to me…
Those Pesky Ethical Duties
Don’t we have a duty of confidentiality? What happened to that?
Whether your entire family can hear just one side of the conversation or both, surely an essential part of your ability to work from home includes the need to be able to meet your basic ethical standards?
And while I accept that there are some general unspoken understandings about spouses and confidentiality (to a degree, at least) at no point can “the new normal” mean “it’s fine for your 9 year old to be talking about your clients at (virtual) school”.
Some people are privileged to have a home office (with a door even!) that they can quarantine themselves while on calls or when needing to work on confidential material.
Others don’t.
So while the 10 year solicitor might own a home with a closed office space, the 2nd year law student who’s renting with 7 other people possibly doesn’t.
But have you told your employer that you don’t have a confidential space to work in? Have they asked? Judging by the sheer amount of pride and humour I see about this kind of stuff, I’m guessing the answer for most people is… “nope”.
Learning Fluid Focus (Task Shifting)
This one deserves an article all by itself, so I’ll just touch on it here.
When I started working from home in 2016 (yep – I’m a pioneer), learning to increase the efficiency of my task switching was one of my first ports of call. After all, jumping from home renovations into a discussion about contract interpretation can be a bit jarring.
The privilege of working in a place where you can follow one course until success (FOCUS) means you have learned to work relatively uninterrupted.
By and large most research in this space suggests that focused work without interruption is far superior (in terms of depth, correctness, and overall efficiency) than the kind of work produced by those who flit from one thing to another. I’m sure you can all read books by Cal Newport yourself if you need a refresher on that topic.
Working from home, for many, is being thrown into an environment that you have absolutely no experience working in. Children asking questions (mine write me detailed notes while I’m on the phone, thinking that I can read and have a phone call at the same time), phones ringing that you need to attend to, background construction noise and Aus Post’s refusal to leave things on the front patio without a signature all collude to interrupt you at every available opportunity.
And you’ve not been trained to work that way. Now it’s true that many of us get interrupted quite a bit at the office too, but much of that is avoidable if needed.
If you do have those interruptions, the result is that you’re almost certainly not working as efficiently as you would if you were at the office. You might or might not even notice this – but it’s happening.
So here’s my question: who’s paying for that inefficiency?
Sure, the fact that you can attend to your children’s needs or assist with tasks as they come up is, in many ways, a benefit of working from home. But it’s probably also costing someone money. So while it’s a benefit for you – is it really a benefit for your employer or your client? If you’re time billing (shock, horror!) and every interruption costs you 15 minutes of catch up time when you’re in the middle of drafting a pleading, can you responsibly charge your client for that?
This one’s a complex topic, but not one that we should just move past without consideration, especially if you’re the person wanting to work from home. Take active steps to learn the skills required, or consider just going into the office.
Some People Need Direct Supervision
OK it’s tough love time: some people shouldn’t be left to self-manage their work.
Why? Because they are bad at it. They simply need more regular opportunities for supervision, input and direction than others in order to get work done well.
And even with phones and constant Zoom invitations it’s just not enough for some staff to be working to their full potential.
Now before the objections begin, I’m not talking about pathological micro-management here.
I’m talking about the fact that some people, if left largely to their own devices, will flounder and become either inefficient in their work output, or potentially just produce bad work that requires extensive rectification.
And sure – you can make calls, arrange zoom meetings or send emails all you like, but those things pale in comparison to the ability to just have a regular brief conversation, clarification or direction from someone else in the office. A few seconds of interaction can save significant amounts of time and steer people away from making costly mistakes.
Notice it’s not necessarily only junior staff I’m talking about here – more collaborative practitioners at all levels tend to do much better in an environment where they can bounce ideas off others. That’s particularly true in complex areas (as opposed to more process driven areas).
Hopefully those with a degree of self-awareness would recognise whether they fall into this category, and take steps accordingly.
Slow Surroundings
There is a certain amount of energy to be had just be being in an environment surrounded by people who are performing at a high level. This is particularly true if you happen to be an extrovert.
Done right, the positive result is more people performing at higher levels. (Done wrong, the negative result is burnout and medical conditions.)
The fact is when you’re working from home it’s pretty easy to… plod. After all, will anyone really notice if drafting that letter took 1.5 hours instead of 1.2? Will you even notice if you’re slowing down?
This is true even if you’re generally fairly self-motivating.
It’s a lot like going for a run – your pace on race day is almost always going to exceed your pace on a solo training run (elite athletes aside). And until you got into the race, there’s a chance you didn’t even think you could reach a particular goal – until you did.
The buzz of an office with people working together in a friendly, positive environment is a tremendous source of potential energy for many lawyers that we can’t just casually toss to one side.
And All the Rest
Everything I’ve mentioned here is a known factor. Nothing here is a big secret or a particularly startling piece of news (except possibly the flared jeans).
What’s interesting though is that most firms don’t seem to have taken any steps to address any of these issues.
Training in task switching? Nope.
Discussing how to set up a confidential workspace and expectations in that regard? Nope.
Realistic discussions with staff who don’t thrive working from home? LOL (law firms being pretty notorious for not wanting to have an honest discussion with under-performing staff, so this is hardly news).
The fact is that liking working from home is not the only relevant factor. Sure it offers many benefits, and potentially many positive outcomes for families and staff alike.
But it’s not a one-way street. The fact that you get some benefits working from home needs to balance with your obligations to your clients and your employer.
And if everyone simply ignores those things without taking practical steps to address them, firms will eventually notice that overall productivity has dropped significantly. The new normal will then become the old normal before you know it.